Feed

Oh digital world...How we step into you, through our natural evolution.  You bring many freedoms, and almost telepathic communications to anyone in the world within seconds.  But you also come with consequence.  Meaningless information about people you don't really care about or would want to know.  The psychology of spending too much time reading this information makes you more and more bitter, the whole spectrum of human emotion is reduced to a 'like'.  As winter is here, and I spend more time indoors, it's time for a break from that world.

 What I love about facebook is that it is a digital memory box.  You can zoom into a month or day at any time since you have been 'using' it and see pictures of that time, your thoughts and conversations.  I always loved to fill memory boxes when I had a home, ticket stubs, photos, little reminders of good days spent all crammed into shoe boxes that maybe one day I would show my kids.  It has free communication to anywhere in the world by just thinking it.

When I am on the road, and staying between places, it is good to login, see some familiar faces and let everyone know how I am and where I am.  I found my news feed was getting smaller and smaller, I would remove anyone who told me any information I never felt I needed to know.  I think thought space is valuable, and should be occupied by good things that justify being looked at or remembered.  And when I find myself looking at photos of some lad in schools wedding, I ask myself if the good sides are outweighing the bad.

When you look at your facebook picture, it is like looking in a digital mirror.  This is how you look to the rest of the digital world.  You are extremely conscious that hundreds, if not thousands of people are seeing these thoughts you type without even speaking.  The profile picture is a good example of how someone is feeling, without saying anything.  It reflects the image they really want you to see.  You at your best, you at your most wrecked, you at the best place you have been.  Some people never change their facebook profile pic, they like to stay the same.  Some change it all the time.  Each side of this behavior is reflecting a core element of that persons personality and mood.

I kind of got used to the fact that I am being watched at all  times by anyone who wants to look.  I always felt that whatever I do online leaves a trace, and this is picked up and viewable to anyone.  If you were to have a conversation in a pub with 200 people in the room.  Only you and whoever you are speaking to would hear what you are saying.  Your body language and eye contact would make the conversation fluent and natural.  The same conversation on facebook bewteen someone who has 200 friends, is read in it's text format in silence, by the 200 people, not fully getting or undersrtanding your true meaning can be read and responded to so wrong.

I think man has a natural want to file things and organise them.  The universe is infinite with no beginning and no end, yet we attach unimaginable year counts to it.  The universe blew up 67 billion years ago or something.  We offer measurements of ages to life, say that once you reach a certain number of years on  this earth you can drink alcohol or smoke, completely ignoring the spectrum of individuality.  Facebook is an extension of us wanting to file our human and social existence.  It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it just has certain side effects that can detach you from real life social interaction.

Too much information on people I don't really know or like.  My brain is taking in this information and giving it a place in my storage department.  You ask someone how they are, and they tell you about something that they have also posted on facebook.  They then begin to tell you something that you already know about, but didn't respond to.  So do you stop them and say I know, or pretend you didn't see it or what?  All these different elements of our social existance are being categorised and filed.  Relationships, events, births, marriages, everything has a tab now! 

Except disliking.  The whole spectrum of human emotion is reduced to a thumbs up or no response.  You either like something or you don't.  Do you like the news of your friends grandmas death, or like the way he said his farewell through a drunken post.  Life is becoming a drunken text message existance, constantly analysing old things you have said or done, and looking back at a pictural and textural past.  I have known social casualties get so caught up in the past, that I start to see facebook as that very flashback.  I am going to try and keep my existence real and verbal.  Not digital and textual.  I will balance my digital existence through email and blogs.  It offers great possibilities to share and communicate this digital world of ours, but for me, not using facebook will re-balance this weight.